AI PC Building Site Creates Parts Lists With Wacky Prices, Takes Forever

PC Builder AI
(Image credit: pcbuilderai.com)

A new PC builder website has cropped up that supposedly helps gamers and professionals build a potent bang-for-buck system with the power of artificial intelligence. Known as pcbuilderai.com, the site aims to take the guesswork out of building an effective PC parts list and give users the best possible parts list with the best components for the price. But, despite the site's modern and simplistic UI, some of the parts it recommends are out of whack with today's market prices.

The creator of PC Builder AI is a company known as AE Studios. According to the company's Indeed page, the company has no venture capital, no outside shareholders, and is apparently focused on creating tech for the development of humanity. The company has already built several AI-based programs, including games, image generators, and text-based AI generators.

To test the effectiveness of the PC Builder AI parts list generator, we grabbed three of our Best PC Builds for Gaming parts lists, priced at $500, $1500, and $3600, respectively, and compared them to the three parts lists the AI-accelerated site generated with the same prices.

Starting at the $500 price class, the PC Builder AI site generated a moderately decent gaming machine featuring a Ryzen 3 3200G. Still, it's an old APU and nothing special, and some components are overpriced. The biggest offender is the memory, which is $40 more expensive than the kit we recommend, with the same capacity and speed. The storage configuration is also bizarre, consisting of a separate 1TB HDD and a tiny 120GB SATA 3 SSD reminiscent of pre-2020 era systems. With the Best SSDs priced at an all-time low right now, you can find 1TB M.2 drives for the same price as the SSD and the HDD combined. This would yield a far better gaming experience and significantly increase the storage speed overall.

The lack of a graphics card is also unfortunate for the AI generator. In our build, we could squeeze in a significantly faster Core i3 CPU and an Arc A310 discrete GPU, which will be more capable than what the 3200G can provide.

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Component TypeOur Recommended Parts ListParts List From AI Site
CPUIntel Core i3-13100FRyzen 3 3200G
MotherboardMSI PRO B760M-PAsus Prime B450M-A
GPUIntel Arc A380N/A
RAMSilicon Power Value Gaming DDR4 RAM 16GB (8GBx2) 3200MHzCorsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4 3200
StorageWD SN570 (1TB)Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB ,Kingston 120GB A400 SATA3 2.5
CaseThermaltake Versa H18Rosewill FBM-X1-400P
PSUThermaltake Smart Series 500W EVGA 500 W1, 80+ WHITE 500W
CoolerN/A, comes with CPUN/A, comes with CPU
Total$493$500

Sadly, the $500 system was the best machine the PC Builder AI website could generate. The $1500 price bracket reveals many pricing problems with the AI system, leading to terrible component choices.

The AI generator's most absurd component choice was the GPU, selecting a $600 RTX 3060 Ti. If you know anything about the GPU market today, you'll know that paying $600 for a previous-generation mid-range 60 series card is utterly ridiculous. You can get a current generation RTX 4070 for that price, which is substantially faster than the 3060 Ti. Alternatively, you can get an RX 6950 XT for that same price. It is AMD's flagship graphics card from the same generation as the 3060 Ti and one of the Best GPUs for gaming.

The CPU choice is also horrible. For some reason, the AI generator chose another previous generation product, a Ryzen 5 5600X, priced at $280. In today's market, that CPU is going for nearly half that price, and a modern Ryzen 5 7600 is still $40 cheaper. For $280, you can get a current generation i5-13600KF — one of the Best CPUs —that can run circles around the 5600X in gaming workloads and heavily multithreaded applications.

The rest of the system is also not great; the motherboard, memory, cooler, and storage options could be much better. Even though the CPU and GPUs are wildly overpriced, we could put in more storage capacity, memory capacity, a higher wattage PSU, and a better cooler in our $1500 build recommendation while spending the same amount of money on the CPU and GPU.

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Component TypeOur Recommended Parts ListParts List From AI Site
CPUIntel Core i5-13600KFRyzen 5 5600X
MotherboardGigabyte Z790 UD AX MSI B450 TOMAHAWK MAX ATX AM4
GPUNvidia RTX 4070Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3060 Ti
RAMTeamGroup T-Force Vulcan DDR5 32GB (2x16GB)Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB
StorageSK hynix Platinum P41 (2TB)Kingston A2000 500 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive
CasePhanteks Eclipse P360A NZXT H510 ATX Mid Tower Case
PSUCorsair CX750MEVGA 600 W1, 80+ WHITE 600W
CoolerID-Cooling FrostFlow 280mmCooler Master Hyper 212 RGB Black Edition
Total:$1518$1480 (Requested $1500)

The same pricing errors also appear in the $3600 build, where the CPU and GPU are incredibly overpriced. The PC Builder AI generator opted for an $800 Ryzen 9 5950X and a $1200 RTX 3080 Ti in this price class. Right now, a 5950X is going for as little as $450, and the 3080 Ti has been easily eclipsed by the newer RTX 4080 at the same price — or again, you could get roughly similar performance for as little as $600 in the form of a Radeon RX 6950 XT. Another option would be the RTX 4070 Ti, which costs $800 and generally outperforms the 3080 Ti.

Thankfully, the rest of the components are not too bad for a $3600 build and have decent quality/performance for the money, but it's not perfect. The SSD choice, in particular, is very strange, with the AI opting for a PCIe 3.0 970 EVO Plus 1TB SSD. For just $10 more, you could get a 990 PRO that is PCIe 4.0 capable with 2TB of storage, or opt for a 1TB Crucial T700 with PCIe 5.0 support. The 64GB RAM option is appropriate for a $3600 build at least, though opting for a previous generation DDR4 platform at this level is strange.

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Component TypeOur Recommended Parts ListParts List From AI Site
CPUAMD Ryzen 9 7900X3DAMD Ryzen 9 5950X
MotherboardAsus ROG Strix X670E-EASUS ROG Strix X570-E Gaming
GPUNvidia RTX 4090NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti
RAMG.Skill Trident Z5 RGB DDR5 (2 x 16GB) DDR5 6400Corsair Vengeance LPX 64GB
StorageWD Black SN850X (4TB)Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1TB NVMe M.2, WD Black 4TB Performance HDD
CaseLian Li Lancool III RGBNZXT H710
PSUCorsair HX1000Corsair RM850x
CoolerDeepCool LT 720 360mm Corsair Hydro Series H150i PRO RGB
Case FansLian Li Uni FAN SL-Infinity 120 RGB 3 PackN/A Using Stock Fans From Case
Total:$3635$3600

Overall, the results AE Studio's PC Builder AI currently generates are very bizarre, and it's not a site we can recommend you use for sound guidance on PC part selection. The site never recommended a current-generation CPU or GPU and priced the graphics card options from the GPU shortage in 2021. We are unsure what AI system the site uses, but it possibly uses information that's from two or three years back, which would explain the bizarre component choices.

If you want good advice on good parts to choose for your next computer, check out our forums or our AI Chatbot, which will generate far better results.

Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.